Celestine Read Online Free PDF Page A

land seen in the miniatures of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry and on the flower-sprinkled tapestry landscapes of the Lady with the Unicorn, which were woven at Aubusson a little way to the south. It is a world full of dangers – huge, trackless forests, outlaws and brigands, cruel blows of fate, parents forced by necessity to cast out their children, wicked step-parents, stolen children being eaten in castles – yet it is also a fundamentally moral and democratic world. The beautiful daughter of the poor woodcutter really does end up marrying the Prince who has seen her while out hunting. The little drummer boy with the merchant father has the confidence to cock a snook at the King who, having first scorned him, has now heard about the richly laden ships and is trying to marry off his daughter:
    Petit tambour, je te donnerai ma fille
    (Little drummer, you can have my daughter)
    To which the drummer replies in the same tone of egalitarian intimacy:
    Sire le Roi, tu peux garder ta fille,
    Dans mon pays ’y en a de plus jolies
    (You, your Majesty, can keep your lass;
    Where I come from, we have prettier by the mass)
    These kings and princes of folk-song don’t sound quite like Charles Sept or Louis Quatorze. They seem more like landed gentry or even just prosperous farmers, rich and powerful only by the standards of the closed societies in which they lived. In the same perspective Bernardet had a story that the house where the ‘Saracens’ lived, which had an imposing barn, had earlier housed a maréchal de France, a Field Marshal, and that his fine chargers had had the barn as their stable.
    I gazed over the peaceful, semi-derelict scene. Barbary ducks, belonging to Monsieur Chezaubernard, the retired hedger-and-ditcher in the end house, waddled and fussed on a patch of waste pasture.
    â€˜You don’t actually remember that time yourself do you, Monsieur Bernardet?’
    â€˜Not myself, no. But my grandfather did.’
    In his mind there existed, only just beyond his own experience, a Chassignolles as busy and populous as in his childhood but a more glorious and self-contained microcosm of the world elsewhere. It was a place where a military chief stabled his horses and falcons were reared for hawking parties, where monks held court in the church as in a palace and where the house with a miniature tower and courtyard was home, not to a man who repaired bicycles, but to a nobleman with gold in his coffers.
    Where La Châtre is concerned this vision may once have had a basis in reality. La Châtre is the small town seven kilometres from Chassignolles, the place where for centuries the village has gone to market, or for a day out, or to seek a situation or an education, to plead a cause or to shelter in the hospital as a last resort. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the draining of the marshes and the cutting back of the forests was ensuring the Berry’s continued, if quiet, prosperity, the walled town of La Châtre had its own might and self-sufficiency. No modern communications sucked its power away to distant administrations. Real noblemen built grand houses there founded on the wool of the Berrichon sheep that ranged the partly tamed heaths and moors to the north of the town. There was a dungeon tower high above the Indre where soldiers were garrisoned and political prisoners were kept, and a chain of water-mills and tanneries along the river’s edge.
    Today tanneries and mills are silent and no modern manufactories have replaced them. The dungeon-tower is a museum full of lace caps and stuffed birds – the birds being the unfortunate bequest of a leading citizen of a hundred years ago. The modern military installations, like the industries, are thirty kilometres away in Châteauroux, and so is the prison, the Assize Court and, now, the nearest railway station. La Châtre is still a shopping and service centre, packed with people from the country